1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a software analysis tool and, more particularly, to an integrated reverse engineering and design workproducts maintenance tool for object-oriented type programming languages, such as, Java, and the like.
2. Background and Related Art
A great variety of tools are available in the software industry to aid in developing, maintaining and updating software programs. One of the difficulties with maintaining and updating software is the ability to keep track of work products generated and determining the affected work products when a source code file that was used to generate the work products is modified. Various approaches have been used to provide tools to aid in analyzing and maintaining software and a number of these approaches are designed for object-oriented coding using sequence diagrams.
For example, the UML (Unified Modeling Language) uses sequence diagrams to capture interactions between software components, such as, objects, methods, modules, entire software applications, sub-systems, and the like. Programs, such as AQTime, employ a static profiler that does not run the application but creates a UML-style diagram that graphically represents the sequence of routine calls. Classes are shown as entities, and source-code calls between methods of different classes are treated as messages.
One of the difficulties with the AQTime tool resides in the fact that the tool is required to operate on the static executable compiled code with appropriate debug information. Since the AQTime tool operates on executable code, it has to rely entirely on the debug information in the executable files which information exists only at the level of classes.
On the other hand, tools, such as DYNO, draw sequence diagrams for a set of classes at runtime. DYNO instruments the classes for which the diagram needs to be drawn, such that, when the classes are run, the relevant data can be collected to draw the diagram. One of the difficulties with DYNO, then, is that it requires a runtime environment while working with files that need to be deployed on an application server or some such other software to be executed.
Although the use of sequence diagrams is key to work products that are used to capture the sequence of messages passed between different classes in typical applications, such use is generally limited to the low level design phase of the application development project. The reason for limiting to the low level design phase is that creating these diagrams for the first time in a project is usually not as difficult and involved as maintaining these diagrams in synch with the changes in code that happen during the later phases of a project.
Accordingly, known software analysis tools fail to provide a simple approach such as to operate directly on object oriented source code, in a reverse engineering manner, such as to identify the impacted work products when any of the source code files of an application program are modified. The ability to readily identify work products impacted by changes in some code files permits easy updating and maintenance of such products.